Once, I was leading a workshop on collaboration and the process by which teams, organizations, and communities can harness the power of their shared creativity. During the lunch break, one of the attendees came up to me and pointed at the slide I had left on the screen. It was an illustration of the moment when a group lets go of its individual assumptions to allow something greater to emerge.
She said, “You see that?! That’s what I call the valley of death.”
“Why do you feel that way?” I asked.
“Because that’s when everything goes wrong and things become much harder. Collaboration is always harder.”
She’s not wrong. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people.”
What makes collaboration so difficult is that we naturally conceive of it as addition—an ongoing “yes, and…” conversation that becomes more and more complicated over time. Eventually, the complexity becomes so great that we feel we have no choice but to retreat back to our own individual perspectives.
Yet when we become committed to the greater aim of what we can create together, a productive tension emerges. The “valley of death” is the space between what each of us wants and what we can create together. Here, the experience becomes less about what each of us adds and more about what each of us is willing to let go.
I often witness—and, if I’m lucky, help—teams, organizations, and communities lean into this moment. What becomes visible is a willingness to voice the difficulty of letting go and to acknowledge the ambiguity that comes with stepping into something that is not yet fully formed or understood.
This is where bonds of trust are built—not only with each other, but within ourselves. It is the self-knowledge that comes from building enough confidence in our own genius to allow the genius of others to move freely around us and with us.
We do not move from “I” to “We” by abandoning the self. We move from “I” to “We” by entering relationships deep enough that a larger possibility can emerge between us.
Image: Google Gemini, August 2026